


Hero Of The Day

by Dariaday



Category: Arrow - Fandom, DCU, The Flash
Genre: Adventure, Aquaman - Freeform, F/M, Overwatch - Freeform, Rarepair, Romance, dubious research from Wikipedia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 00:19:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13259646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dariaday/pseuds/Dariaday
Summary: Felicity Smoak, tech support to the JLA, is called into the field on a one-of-a-kind operation to free Aquaman from exile. Whoever he is. She doesn't care. Field operations pay better than being a (valued) lab rat at STAR Labs, and she needs the money for her individual research ideas. Anyway, Bruce and Barry and Cisco and her beloved Dr. Wells promised her,they promised, that the op would only take a day. She'd only have to be transformed into some weird, underwater creature from the black lagoon or whatever for one day. Her outfit is bitchin', her role is easy, and her rep needs the superhero boost. Supposedly, this Arthur Curry fellow even knows she's coming through the breach. What could go wrong?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure, anything smelling of canon comes from Wikipedia, and even then, I will probably mess it up. Please don't come @ me. I just love Felicity Smoak and think, you know, she'd have fun with Aquaman. And basically every other superhero in both comic kingdoms. I've been trolling AO3 and know that this is a thing, so here you go! This is all just for fun. 
> 
> In this fic, Felicity works at STAR Labs. Wells is not evil, but he is in the chair. Barry is a little bit more of a grownup, Flashpoint has happened so Caitlin and Cisco have powers. Bruce is old enough to be a grandpa, and Felicity never went to Starling City to work at QC. In this fic, Oliver Queen is more "Ollie Queen," a foil to Bruce Wayne's darkness. And he doesn't come into the fic. Repeat: NO OLICITY in this fic. (I love Olicity. But I like rarepairs soooo much.)

Bruce Wayne dressed too bespoke for Central City. Black worsted-wool Armani, silk shirt that cost more than the hologram machine, black oxfords so custom the designer was an old Italian man with a leatherwork shop in Siena. Add to that his secret JLA portal with its unique anti-Flashpoint safety mechanism that only he was allowed to travel through, and it was easy to hate him.

Easy for Felicity, anyway. Cisco was in the inner sanctum, drooling. 

Felicity Smoak glanced at her surveillance cameras to make sure all the JLA members were still present and accounted for, then turned back to the new program she was writing. Zatanna needed her spells turned into apps, and who was making bank on that? Yes, ma’am. It was hard out there for a non-superhero, and Felicity’s college loans were so newly paid off she still hadn’t re-allocated the payments anywhere. Just in case. Harrison Wells let his employees develop whatever the hell they wanted whenever they wanted, as long as their STAR Labs jobs were going well, none of this “intellectual property” greediness other companies had. That was the reason Felicity had accepted the job at STAR Labs after MIT. Well, that and the chance to work with the Justice League. If she’d known that “subcontractor for Justice” meant she’d be at Bruce Wayne’s beck and call, she’d have hoofed it back to Vegas and cybercrimed her way to a Lake Tahoe summer home. 

But who’d managed to re-shield Themyscira after the Crime Syndicate tried to eat it? Who invented the nanotech to find Ray Palmer after he peaced out? Who coded the anti-Flashpoint tech that WayneTech appropriated for their own sneaky, selfish purposes?

“Me,” Felicity whispered. She took another peek at the brain trust upstairs. Mostly to memorize the Batman’s outfit so she could mock him with Barry later, but also because the last time more than four Justice League members got together for a little coffee and bagels, they’d been sucked into Earth-14 by an accidental breach. No, really—some natural disaster in Earth-13 got all the interdimensional wires crossed, and something burped, and there was a breach, and the heroes of the day went missing for twenty-four hours or so. 

Nothing she couldn’t handle.

That was the reason Cisco got to sit at the grownup’s table. As Vibe, a breacher, he could stop any more multi-earth belching. Also, he deserved to be there today. He’d been point on the R and D for Bruce’s latest and most ridiculous gadget request: The Hand. 

Felicity laughed. She couldn’t help it. Every time the prototype floated into her mind all she could think of were the jokes they’d come up with while they were making the cursed thing. Not literally cursed, of course, though it was more supernatural than she liked. For reasons he refused to grunt about, Bruce Wayne required a cybernetic hand with a _hole in the middle_. Even the most elegant design from Cisco’s pen looked like it should have a black modesty box covering it up. Felicity had done the heavy lifting on the nanotech and the coding, not to mention the actual mech-e, while Harrison Wells kept handing her schematics that cheated on the Standard Model and jumped right Mindfuck Physics. ™ She got it done, though. They all did.

And it matched Bruce’s outfit.

Felicity texted Zatanna with an as-requested daily update. Any fool could tell Z was going to start an all-girl garage band, and Felicity wanted that to happen as soon as possible. Not that the JLA wasn’t mighty and honorable and World-Saving and all, but sometimes you just needed a tight, specialized group of superwomen to low-key save the world. With badassery. Zatanna’s team, whoever she was thinking of recruiting, could go into smaller places, less newsworthy places, places that barely showed up on the map but whose people were suffering just as much.

Girl Team? LadyJustices? Ground Zero Fixer Uppers? 

“Sorry, Cisco,” Felicity whispered under her breath, even though he was three floors up and couldn’t read her mind anyway. She was the worst at names. The _worst._

“Miss Smoak.”

Felicity jumped. Harrison Wells wheeled himself down the ramp to the lab she shared with Cisco Ramon and gently inclined his head toward her array of security cameras. His dark frames hid intelligent eyes, but weren’t a thin disguise of an alter-ego. He really needed the wheelchair—at least until she and Caitlin Snow developed a spinal implant he wouldn’t dismiss out of hand—and his money was from selling patents, not a legacy of investing the family gold. He was brilliant, cutting-edge, and had the best of all qualities in an innovator: hope. Of all the non-masked crusaders in all the worlds, Harrison Wells was Felicity’s favorite. 

And it had nothing to do with the fact that he’d taken her side during that Calculator Debacle. Nothing at all.

“We have a situation,” he said.

Felicity’s head whipped toward the screens. 

“They’re all still there,” she breathed, hand over her heart. “What—what situation? Is it the particle accelerator?” 

If the “situation” didn’t involve the Justice League, then the PA had to be on the fritz. Nothing else would warrant Wells descending into the bowels of the building without calling first.

“We need you upstairs.” Wells sighed a little at her deer-in-headlights look. “You haven’t done anything wrong. Come on.”

Felicity made him wait while she locked up everything that could be stolen or explode accidentally, then followed him up to the Bridge. Not that they called it that. It was Central Command, but Felicity likened the gray walls and multi-screened room adjacent to the private med-bay and Well’s inner sanctum to the heart of the Starship Enterprise. That’s where it all happened. Barry’s suit was stored there, and the comp-hack center was laid out with room for her to pace when she ran comms for local missions. Right now, there was some kind of freaky magic mesh they had to go through to ensure they couldn’t be seen or heard.

By anyone without her one-of-a-kind security clearance and an array of spytech windows on her desk.

“Hey, Felicity,” Barry said, waving awkwardly at the same time he straightened up to his full string bean height.

Nervous, not resigned. Worried, not afraid. Felicity read his body language as if the Flash were wearing the suit and churning out cardiac and cerebral impulses. He was her friend before he was the man who saved Central City. And right now, he wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at Bruce Wayne.

Who was so totally the Batman, cowl or no cowl. How anyone could think vapid, world-traveling, starlet-shtupping Bruce Wayne was anything other than a dangerous weapon was beyond her. His eyes, for pete’s sake. Shark.

“Not King Shark,” she said aloud. 

“No, it’s not a local problem,” Wells said, wheeling himself to the edge of the group. “Mr. Wayne has an interesting situation that requires your unique assistance.”

“Yes, sir,” Felicity said to Wells. _Then_ she turned to Bruce, and tilted her head, awaiting a good grovel. He owed her like twelve apologies. Eleven, if you took off one for the time she cracked the lock on his wine cellar so Ollie Queen could steal a good bottle of red.

“Felicity, good to see you.”

“Spit it out, Mr. Wayne.”

Behind her, Cisco sucked in a breath. Whether that was because she was sassing the prince of darkness or because he was afraid she’d babble an innuendo about swallowing, Felicity did not turn around to see.

“The creation of the cybernetic hand is beyond my specifications. Excellent work. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Felicity looked around the room, her heart starting to race. No one was looking directly at her. Not even Caitlin, who could usually be counted on for an encouraging smile. But wait—Caitlin Snow, who sometimes got a little frosty when she was mad, was not part of the JLA. They were hero-adjacent, as Cisco liked to say. And with Wells there, too… “What’s the home team doing here?” she asked. “I mean, you and Barry and Cy and Mr. Superman, I expect. Superkent, I mean. No, I mean—”

“It’s all right,” Clark Kent said to her, softly. Kindly. Blue eyes compassionate behind his fake glasses.

“We thought you could use moral support,” Barry said. “You don’t have to say yes. But if you do, we are behind you a hundred percent.”

“Say yes to what?” Felicity took a step backwards. She couldn’t flee, obviously, but it felt better to have a little distance between her and all that brooding. 

“The Justice League needs you in the field,” Bruce told her.

“Oh no,” Felicity said, holding up both hands. “Absolutely not. No way. Uh-uh. Bad idea. Bad. Cisco, tell the nice Batman why it’s a really bad idea?”

“I showed him the statistics _and_ the video documentation, and he didn’t even blink,” Cisco whispered. 

Bruce Wayne came towards her, carrying The Hand in the titanium case. “A friend of mine is severely injured. This hand you’ve created is going to renew his quality of life, among other things. As I’m sure you know, the hole in the center of the palm awaits a magic interface. What you don’t know is that the installation of the power can only be done by someone fully human, and female.”

“Oh my G-d,” Felicity moaned, drawing out the vowel. “That’s so ridiculous. And offensive. And lame. That makes no sense. What kind of stupid thing needs my X chromosome to get turned on?”

Cisco turned his snort into a cough. Which she appreciated.

Bruce Wayne held up a hand, Felicity took a breath, and he started explaining the mission. 

“Using a chrono-fae serum, you will briefly become a non-worshiped entity and affix the supernatural power source to the center of the hand, then deliver it to its intended owner. As soon as you’ve installed the hand to the receiver, you’ll revert to your normal, human state and return to the nearest JLA base for debrief and transport back to Central City.”

Bruce’s fierce eyes dared her to argue. And Felicity was usually down to argue, but he wasn’t hiding his desperation today. He really wanted his friend to have the use of both hands, and since the unknown handless-guy was clearly a meta or an alien or something else, there had to be some crazy magic supernatural bullshit in the mix. She just would have appreciated that in the design briefs Bruce had sent, annoyingly, on an almost daily basis while she was building the thing.

“Putting aside the part where you’re asking me to do some kind of stupid-crazy cosplay that will probably get me killed, when did you know you needed me to deliver it?” Felicity asked suspiciously.

“Today,” Bruce said. “Now.”

“It’s true,” Barry piped up. “We thought I could do it. Speed, accelerated healing, knowledge of the subject. Wonder Woman sent fresh intel this morning that proves we need a woman to complete the transfer.”

“Human, not meta,” Caitlin added. “Otherwise, I’d do it.”

Ugh. Not fair. Now if she said no, she’d be less noble than Killer Frost. 

“What about Oracle? She’s human.”

“She’s expecting,” Bruce said. And for a second, his eyes lit up. And he almost smiled. And then Felicity caved a little, because of course Bruce Wayne was going to be a grandpa and he would be insufferable. Good for Dick and Barbara, though. Yay babies. 

_Ugh._

“Very few other JLA Helpers have the proper clearance, talent, and fortitude as you do, Miss Smoak,” Clark Kent offered, before she could suggest that he get Lois or someone else from Metropolis to do it. “Also, we need to get the hand to its owner in the next twelve hours.”

“Or what, the end of the world?”

“Not sure,” Wells admitted. “Might just be climate change.”

“You’re…you’re doing that thing where you understate the risk,” Felicity translated, looking at her mentor. “Climate change, like…tectonic plates moving around? Instant Ice Age?”

“Felicity, if there was anyone else in the world, I would pick them,” Bruce said, aggrieved. 

“Gee, thanks.”

“Our other option is to reach out to our friends in Hub City and Starling and see if their female team members are available and appropriate for security clearance at this level, but that will take too long,” Barry told her. “We need to send someone now.”

“You’re here, you’re available. You’re smart and have security clearance. You can do this, Felicity.” Bruce set the case down on the computer desk. He sighed. He put a comforting, almost-fatherly hand on her shoulder and lowered his voice. “I’m sorry about Bludhaven. I honestly did not know about the Calculator.”

“Dammit.” Felicity’s heart rate increased. “Dammit, Bruce. Ugh. Fine. Oh my G-d, I’m going to be a metahuman. Oh G-d.”

“Only for like, a day!” Cisco was a flurry of activity at the side of the room, gathering materials. “I’ve had all this prepared for weeks, and I’ve got it to Barry’s specifications, but you probably weigh about the same, right?”

If looks could kill, though.

“We’ll recalculate the serum, obviously,” Caitlin said. “Come on, I’ll get your vitals.”

Which is how Felicity found herself stripped down to her good lace bra and matching underwear, because you never know when you’re going to be in an accident, letting Caitlin Snow engineer a syringe full of a custom supernatural genome-defying serum that hopefully wouldn’t let her fail in the field this time.

“The Flash will transport you to this location,” Bruce said, showing her a map of a place that Felicity knew was _other._ He pointedly ignored her state of undress. Clark Kent purposefully had his back turned and was talking with Dr. Wells. “My friend will find you, not the other way around. You shouldn’t have to wait long. I told him you were coming. Well, I told him Barry was coming. He won’t mind the change in courier.”

And Bruce Wayne frowned, which made Felicity’s heart rate pick up. Caitlin clucked at her.

“You don’t trust this guy?” she squeaked.

“I trust him with my life, as he’s saved it more than once,” Bruce replied smoothly. “Nothing will go wrong.”

“He’s worried that Arthur is probably going to flirt with you and he didn’t plan for that and now he’s afraid that you’ll say something embarrassing and cause an interdimensional war or something. Okay, here’s your outfit. I’m really, really sorry.” Cisco came in bearing a skintight black bodysuit on a hanger. It looked like a dead ghost.

“I’m not wearing that. And who’s Arthur?”

Felicity’s heart skipped again when everyone in the room looked at each other and not at her.

“No, really—I don’t know him. And I know all the heroes and adjacent heroes in the clubhouse. If I am in the field, I am _in the field._ You can’t hold back information from me. They can’t hold back information from me, right?” Felicity’s voice rose in panic as Wells wheeled himself into the now-crowded med bay.

“Give us a few minutes, okay?” Wells said to the room in general. Caitlin ushered everyone out and Felicity pulled on the hospital johnnie to cover herself up. She was not going anywhere near that jumpsuit, and Cisco was a dead man for even bringing it into the room.

“Dr. Wells, who’s Arthur? Am I in danger?”

“Arthur Curry is an old hero, Felicity. He was lost to the world long before you started working at STAR Labs. After helping Bruce and Diana on a few missions, an enemy by the name of Graves sent him into exile. Our intelligence indicates he is still in that other dimension. The serum will temporarily give you the ability to breathe underwater so that you can infiltrate the breach, install the new technology, and free Aquaman.”

“Aquaman?” Felicity’s brow furrowed. “Something about the Cold War, I think…did he lift a submarine or something?”

“Ah, you remember your history. Vladisberg, yes.”

“Drunk history.”

“Mr. Curry is not dangerous. He is anxious for his freedom, but he isn’t going to kill the messenger. You will be perfectly safe at all times.”

“Why does that sound like a threat?”

“Felicity.” Wells took her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back. “I wouldn’t have suggested your name for this operation if I didn’t believe you were truly the best person for the job. Barry would have been on comms with you for the whole installation anyway. This is more efficient. When the op is over, you’ll be delivered to the JLA safehouse in Santorini. Take a few days, relax. Your fieldwork paycheck is going to be spectacular.”

Felicity smiled. “Okay, I believe you. Go to the creepy interdimensional tidal zone, give the superhero a hand, get out and work on my tan. I can do it. But I’m not wearing the jumpsuit.”

Cisco stuck his head around the door. “It’s a wetsuit with new gen scales, physiology-sensors, breach capacitors, magic absorption capabilities and my thinnest Kevlar ever. Patent-pending.”

“I grew up in Vegas,” Felicity muttered. Cisco didn’t hear her. Wells’ eyes widened, but before he could say anything, Caitlin and Barry came back in, tripping over each other’s encouraging words. They must have practiced while she was freaking out.

Felicity lost the battle with the jumpsuit. Clark Kent looked physically ill at the idea of her going into the field without “armor” and Bruce grunted his approval of Cisco’s work. 

“You had this lying around?” Felicity asked pointedly when she was clad in the skin-tight scales. All she needed was a mermaid tail and she’d be in a cartoon. “Cisco, what the hell?”

“Sara Lance needed an underwater battle suit for one of their Time Jumps. You’re about the same size. Height-wise, I mean. ‘Round back, girl, you _fine._ ”

Coming from Cisco, it wasn’t creepy. He had the same reverence when he talked about alien technology. Felicity stuck her tongue out at him. 

“Yeah, okay, not part of the op.” Barry easily lifted Felicity in his arms. Underneath his mask, his eyes were serious. “Felicity, this is a very important mission. Are you ready?”

Felicity clutched the case that carried the Hand to her chest. She pushed her glasses up her nose and tried to think of something funny, something quippy to make his eyes smile again, but she couldn’t do it. This Barry was all-business. This was the Flash, one of the founding members of the Justice League of America. And he was about to run her to the go-zone of a secret operation to aid and abet a powerful metahuman to escape exile. And the whole thing was going to probably take place in a lake or an ocean or something.

And she did not know how to swim.


	2. Chapter 2

Somewhere around the second hour of waiting, alone, on the shore of a black lake, Felicity realized her problem. On the sliding scale of problems it was above college debt and below cancer, but was making her think about packing up her pride and getting a job with Zuckerberg. 

 

How could Arthur Curry find her if she was supposed to free him?

 

Still in the titanium box, which weighed a ton even though it was totally waterproof, the Hand was starting to become more of a…presence…than she’d expected. She hadn’t even popped the gooey magic center into the thing and already she felt it in the back of her mind, nagging her. Think of a plan, Felicity. Use your head, Felicity. 

 

Reluctantly, she slipped off her nice, safe rock on the shore and walked down to the water. The water really was black, not a reflection of a dark sky. It was thin like water, not thick like blood, but it was clearly otherworldly. Barry had dropped her off at this “loch” in the middle of Nowhere, Scotland and then raced back to Central City. She had no supplies for a long, boring wait, just the suit she was wearing, the Hand, and a vial of cosplay serum. Barry was evasive when she’d asked him exactly which “non-worshiped entity” she had to become in order to plunge into the lake unaffected. Her knowledge of water goddesses was shamefully thin. But it was clear that she had to chug the contents of the vial.

 

It was a really big lake, though. Like, she couldn’t see the other side. That might have been part of the “other” ness, too, like how they’d clearly gone through some sort of mirror portal that made Barry almost drop her. The trees were the same, but she couldn’t feel the wind that ruffled their tops. Rocks felt the same, but the mica in them didn’t glitter. The rocky sand bore no footprints except her own and the marshy reeds at the edge didn’t ripple with a single fish. It was earth, but not-earth. Normal, but not-normal. 

 

And she didn’t know what to do.

 

Finally, she just decided to dip one black-clad toe into the water. Like a shadow kissing another shadow. It felt tepid, not cold like Scotland lakes were supposed to be. This was definitely off-brochure. She drew her foot back and scanned the shore, hoping that this Arthur person would send some kind of emissary to her now that she’d “knocked” on the door on his house. Prison. Whatever. And wait, if he was incarcerated here and had been lost for decades, what kind of security was she dealing with? She wasn’t even carrying so much as a knife, much less a gun or even a really good whistle. 

 

The wind picked up. Felicity didn’t feel it. Tiny grains of sand around her quivered, but she didn’t feel an earthquake. In the middle of the lake, a single fish jumped, sending ripples all the way to her place on the shore. Felicity watched the spot, hoping to see another sign of life, and saw a fast ripple moving sideways through the water, cutting the black liquid like a knife. It was longer than a fish, bigger than, and oh, that was not a fish or a man—

 

Felicity fell on her ass and screamed as a prehistoric, smooth, lizard-like head breached the surface of the water. Its head was as big as her torso and it didn’t matter that it was still offshore because when it opened its enormous jaws, she saw its teeth. Those were the teeth of a meat-eater, not a docile herbivore. She scrabbled backward toward the rock as the creature screamed at her. Its black eyes glittered and its nostrils flared and it rose out of the water, a huge, enormous body covered in scales. 

 

 _Drink._ The command entered her mind with migraine-like pain. Not her thoughts, not her idea. Someone had spoken _into her brain_ which meant there was a meta around, one who could either see what was happening or knew the lake monster was about to eat her and didn’t like the idea. Was this the “contact” Bruce Wayne had advertised? Felicity kept her eyes on the creature, who was stomping toward her on short, stubby legs more suited to swimming than walking on land, she hoped. 

 

 _Drink._ This time, Felicity obeyed. She unscrewed the cap on the vial and tipped the bright liquid down her throat. At first, she didn’t feel anything. She didn’t taste anything except bitter metahuman nonsense with a twist of lemon. Then her lower back stopped aching, she wasn’t cold anymore, and her eyesight went blurry. She whipped off her glasses, because she was _sure_ she’d seen the monster not six feet from shore, only to find she didn’t need her glasses anymore. She could see just fine. And it was four feet, not six. And it wasn’t a mirage or a mechanical trick, it was a real, living and breathing lake monster with an elongated neck, dragonhide protecting its organs, and a crafty look in its intelligent, satanic eyes. Felicity didn’t think she believed in the devil, but if she did, this would be the sort of thing he would have in his lake. Leviathans. Monsters. Secrets of the deep. 

 

“Nimue,” the lake monster addressed her. “Cursed be your offspring to the eleventh generation.”

 

Felicity could not shut her gaping mouth. She was Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, as in, _freaking King Arthur’s_ Nimue, and no matter how many times modern brits tried to shrug her off as a watery tart hurling scimitars, Felicity knew that the woman had been real, powerful, and smart. Smart enough to stop staring like a drunken tourist and say something clever.

 

She didn’t know how to sass a Satanic version of Nessie. 

 

“They call you Nessie on the other side of the veil,” Felicity said. “It’s cute. Suits you.”

 

The lake monster reared back and stomped its feet, splashing her with the black water.

 

“You’re here for the prince of Atlantis.”

 

“I have a gift for Arthur Curry,” Felicity replied.

 

“Arthur Curry is dead.”

 

Felicity rolled her eyes. If Evil Nessie was going to eat her, it would have done it already. This was posturing. This was stalling. This was… _stalling_. Ohhhh. And what kind of magic was Felicity supposed to insert into the middle of the Hand? Probably something this lake monster spent most of its life guarding.

 

Freaking figured they wanted Barry Allen to speed in and steal it.

 

“You know what I want,” Felicity said, ignoring the fact that the monster was inching toward her.

 

Nessie stopped. “You would take the jewel from me?”

 

“It’s time. I need it for a…for an item of grave, spiritual importance.”

 

“There is no earthly reason I would give you the Ruby of Ganymede, whose blood-red light invades every heart of the—”

 

“Whatever. Give me the jewel, and I’ll let you through the veil.”

 

“You jest, Nimue.”

 

“Nope. Even trade.”

 

Felicity hoped that whoever was monitoring the location where Barry had run her through space and time was prepared with some nice, fantastical modern containment devices and/or nets, otherwise the Atlantic was going to see an increase in breeding leviathans. Love wins! And so would her mission and well-deserved Santorini vacation.

 

The monster narrowed its dark, glittering eyes and bared its teeth at her one last time. Then it dove backwards, its sharp claws slicing hard bits of water into perfect arcs. The ripples hadn’t reached shore when it breached the water again, throwing a small, glittering red rock at Felicity. For a second she was tempted to hurl the jewel back into the water like a game of catch with a good dog, but Nessie was already heaving its bulk toward shore. 

 

“You have the jewel,” it said, not even looking at Felicity. Its eyes were on the bit of rock where Barry had left her. “Let me through.”

 

“Uh, go ahead.” Felicity waved her hand in the general direction of the earth she remembered, hoping against hope that whatever potion she’d downed had given her not just the ability to breathe underwater, but also the ability to let evil lake monsters pass between worlds. She crossed all her fingers and tried to cross her toes but they were cold, and she was breathing hard and holding the jewel so tight it pinched her skin. 

 

Just when she was afraid she’d have to scream for help to that mystery voice that had saved her bacon, the lake monster took one giant leap into the air and disappeared.

 

“Yes!” Felicity fist pumped the hand with the jewel, then knelt on the sand. She popped open the titanium box and took one last look at the Hand. Now that she knew it was a magic jewel that was missing in the middle, the hole didn’t look obscene. It looked like it was waiting. Waiting to be whole, so that it could fulfill its destiny. Which was impossible, because the thing was a miracle of physics that technically didn’t exist, but it wasn’t sentient. Was it?

 

No, it just needed the Ruby of Ganymede. 

 

“Here you go, Bruce,” Felicity muttered. She slid the jewel into the Hand’s empty space, where it fit perfectly. Were there magic words she was supposed to chant? Nimue would know, obviously, but no matter what was in that compound, Felicity wasn’t a powerful witch goddess, she was just a hacker with a deadbeat dad. This was out of her wheelhouse. The jewel looked dull against the gray foam padding of the case underneath it. And then, as she stroked the hard red glass and mentally begged it to work, it started to glow. 

 

And the fingers curled.

 

“GAH!” Felicity sat down hard on the sand. In the case, the Hand hummed itself to life, which was a sound she knew from lab tests, but underneath was a current of magic that whispered in the back of her brain, along her skin, into her soul. She didn’t know the words. She knew the words. 

 

 _Good girl,_ said the mystery voice. _Come find me. Don’t be afraid._

 

“Who are you? And what are you doing in my head?”

 

_I’m not in your head. I’m speaking through the water. Come find me. Hurry. It won’t take them long to notice the Monster of Loch Nessurach has been lured away from its guard post._

 

“Okay,” Felicity said. “I’m Felicity, by the way. Felicity Smoak.”

 

_I know. Nimue never would have thought to allow the monster through the veil._

 

“Was that a bad—did I—did I just kill half of Scotland?”

 

The voice laughed, but it was a rusty sound. _No,_ it assured her. _Your people can handle it. Now, hurry._

 

“Yep. Got a new hand for you and stuff. And if I die on this mission it’s only because I can’t swim, not because I didn’t try. You tell them that, okay? You tell Bruce Wayne that.”

 

_Felicity. Come._

 

And because the voice wasn’t teasing her, and because it sounded the tiniest bit afraid but _not_ about the fact that she couldn’t swim, and because so far he hadn’t steered her wrong, and because the potion had worked once already, Felicity waded into the water with the mechanical hand tucked into the top of her wetsuit, and dove underneath the rippling black waves.


End file.
